Videos

The impact of vaccination on dengue virulence

Presenter
March 21, 2012
Abstract
Virulence evolution has a long history, including the now-classic paper of Gandon et al. 2001 on the impact of malaria vaccination on the virulence of the parasite. Gandon et al. found that a vaccine with the action of reducing the pathogen growth rate in the host selects for more virulent pathogens, while an infection-blocking vaccine selects for less virulent pathogens. We found that, in the context of mosquito transgenesis, that relaxing one assumption of Gandon et al. leads to an inability to predict the direction of selection on pathogen virulence. I will discuss these issues in the context of dengue vaccine.